NEWS OF 150 YEARS AGO
November-December 1862
From The Missouri Democrat, Wednesday, December 3, 1862.
THE McNEIL EXECUTION IN MISSOURI.
A St. Louis correspondent of the Columbus Crisis writes as follows:
“The man for whom General McNeil shot ten some time ago, and which was noticed in the Crisis, has returned home alive and well, and his wife, before the execution of those men, went to him (General McNeil) and plead with him to wait and see if he had been killed before he executed those men, and the brute spurned her. I can write no more.” ST. LOUIS.”
The story of the correspondent of the Crisis is a lie out of whole cloth. It has already furnished a theme for extravagant and abusive comment from the Cincinnati Enquirer, and will doubtless go the round of the Democratic press of the whole North. There will be no measure to the horror these papers will exhibit at the atrocities of General McNeil. The well authenticated barbarisms of the rebel authorities, however, excite no revulsion in the feelings of these patriotic editors. They have never said a word at the savage cruelties practised upon the innocent Union men of East Tennessee. The horrible shooting of the drowning seamen in the waters of White river, at the storming of Fort St. Charles, by order of the Confederate commander, is passed by without one tithe of condemnation they now visit upon the unavoidable severities of Union officers. There is but one conclusion in view of this state of things, and that is, that the hearts of the majority of Democratic editors of the North are altogether with the South. They are a pack of villainous traitors, exaggerating the rigors of Federal rule, and manufacturing the grossest lies against the Government and its officers, for the purpose of dividing the people of the North in their attachment to the Union.
